ReactOS 0.2.3 Released

cuppm writes "ReactOS has just released version 0.2.3 of their free WinNT/2k clone! 'New LiveCD image, improved and more stable kernel and win32k kernel graphics subsystem, lots of networking foundation work, improved setup and better bundled explorer, command shell and drivers. Also included is newly ported user DLL code from WINE.' Download it here. It works pretty well in VMware and is progressing quickly."

Comments

Great

[anonymous cowherd (m]

If this gets to the point where it can run a lot of popular Windows applications flawlessly, Microsoft will have to introduce some more undocumented system calls and other incompatibilities to make life difficult. My memory is a little fuzzy on this, but I seem to recall them doing this when updating DOS versions. Mysteriously, certain competitor's apps stopped working...

Either that, or MS will switch from being an OS vendor to a support vendor.

Yeah right, and monkeys will fly out my butt.

Re:Uh

[Durin_Deathless]

Yes, because try as we might, many of us can't not have a Windows machine around. If this works out, we could have a Windows machine without needing to pay the MS tax. Hopefully, we could have a machine fully capable of running XP apps with a *NIX compatible system underneath.

In theory, ReactOS can be ported to other platforms, so the Win32 API could become a sort of write-once run-anywhere system. ReactOS also can be extended quite easily, so I could have an ObjC layer if I wanted to write it.

Re:Uh

[anonymous cowherd (m]

In theory, ReactOS can be ported to other platforms, so the Win32 API could becom ea sort of write-once run-anywhere system. ReactOS also can be extended quite easily, so i could have an ObjC layer if I wanted to write it.

Sure, but unless you would like to emulate the Pentium 4 as part of the OS as well, you will need to recompile the apps. That means you need source code. Good luck running MS Office on ReactOS running on any of the non-Intel, non-PPC platforms here

This does most of those who maintain both a Windows box and an OSS box absolutely no good. The only reason they have the Windows box is for that one game, app, etc, that runs only on Windows/x86.

I realize I glossed over the first part of your post by omission, but really, Wine is what you want if you want to run Windows/x86 apps on top of a *nix compatible OS.

Re:Uh

[usrusr]

hmmm

from what i've heard i got the impression that reactOS is all about making an nt style _kernel_, and most of the higher level win32 api stuff is mainly ported from wine, so it is more a non-unix system with a "unix-style win32-api" running on top of it.

but the end result being useful or not, the efforts of the reactOS project have already resulted in some advances in the mingw flavour of gcc, so i could easily see the wine api development profiting from this as well. (and don't come at me with "then they'd better invest their time directly in wine, spare time projects - reactOS certainly falls into that category - just don't work that way)

ps: and hey, who knows, maybe this thing will get really really good and one day they can make a better foss unix by adding a unix subsystem on top of their kernel ;-) (and while i am really just jesting, remember that nt was designed to support multiple "subsystem" OS frontents, every good joke has some truth in it)

Interesting

[winchester]

It would be interesting to use the ReactOS kernel sources, hook some decent file systems to the kernel and create a good, fully implemented posix subsystem.

This way we would have a system capable of running Windows applications _and_ Linux applications.... which would be very nice.